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The Difference Between “Being” and “Doing”
How our goal-setting mind causes us to fixate on one track, and how we can become more
responsive to the richness and complexity that each moment presents.
By Zindel Segal | October 27, 2016
The activities of the mind are related to
patterns of brain activity. Different mental
activities, such as reading a book, painting a
picture, or talking to a loved one, each involve
different patterns of interaction between networks
of nerve cells in the brain. The networks involved
in one activity are often different from those
involved in another activity. Networks can also be
linked together in different patterns. If we looked
into the brain, we would see shifting patterns in
the activity of networks and in their connections
with each other as the mind moves from one task
to another. For a while, one pattern predominates,
then a shift occurs, so brain networks that
previously interacted in one pattern now do so in a
different configuration. Over time, we would see
the different activities of the mind reflected in
continually shifting and evolving patterns of
interaction between brain networks.
If we looked long enough, we would see that a
limited number of core patterns of brain activity
and interaction seem to crop up as recurring
features in a wide variety of different mental
activities. These core patterns reflect some basic
“modes of mind.”
We can think of these modes of mind as
loosely analogous to the gears of a car. Just as
each gear has a particular use (starting,
accelerating, cruising, etc.), so each mode of mind
has its own particular characteristics and functions.
Over the course of a day, as the mind switches
from one kind of activity to another, the
underlying mode of mind changes—a little like
the way that a car, driven through a busy city,
there will be a continuous series of changes from
one gear to another. And in much the same way a
car can only be in one gear at a time, when the
mind is in certain modes, it will not be in other
modes at the same time.
The fact that a limited number of fundamental
modes of mind underpin a wide variety of mental
activities has important implications. It opens a
way for us to use aspects of everyday experience
to learn new ways to relate to the kind of mind
states that lead to rumination. We can think of
mindfulness training as a way to learn how to
become more aware of your mode of mind
(“mental gear”) at any moment, and the skills to
disengage from unhelpful modes of mind and to
engage more helpful modes. We might describe
this as learning to shift mental gears. In practice,
this task often comes down to recognizing two
main modes in which the mind operates, and
learning the skills to move from one to the other.
These two modes are known as “doing” and
“being.”
THE “DOING” MODE
The ruminative state of mind is actually a
variant of a much more general mode of mind that
has been called the “doing” mode. The job of this
mode of mind is to get things done—to achieve
particular goals that the mind has set. These goals
could relate to the external world—to make a
meal, build a house, or travel to the moon—or to
the internal world of self—to feel happy, not
make mistakes, never be depressed again, or be a
good person. The basic strategy to achieve such
goals involves something we call the “discrepancy
monitor”: a process that continually monitors and
evaluates our current situation against a model or
standard—an idea of what is desired, required,
expected, or feared. Once this discrepancy
monitor is switched on, it will find mismatches
between how things are and how we think they
should be. That is its job. Registering these
mismatches motivates further attempts to reduce
these discrepancies. But, crucially, dwelling on
how things are not as we want them to be can,
naturally enough, create further negative mood. In
this way, our attempts to solve a “problem” by
endlessly thinking about it can keep us locked into
the state of mind from which we are doing our
best to escape.
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How the Discrepancy Monitor Works:
1) First we create an idea of how we want
things to be, or how we think they should be.
2) Next, we compare that with our idea of how
things are right now.
3) If there is a difference between how things
are and how we want them to be, then we generate
thoughts and actions to try to close the gap.
4) We monitor progress to see whether the gap
is increasing or decreasing, and adjust our actions
accordingly.
5) We know we have reached our goal when
our idea of how things are coincides with our idea
of how we want them to be.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this
doing mode. In fact, quite the reverse: This
approach has worked brilliantly as a general
strategy for solving problems and achieving goals
in the impersonal, external world—whether those
goals be as humble as buying all the items on our
weekly shopping list or as lofty as building a
pyramid. It is natural, then, that we should turn to
this same doing mode when things are not as we
would like them to be in our personal, internal
worlds—our feelings and thoughts, or the kind of
person we see ourselves to be. And this is where
things can go terribly wrong.
But before we go on to describe how, it is
important to forestall any possible
misunderstanding. We are in no way suggesting
that the doing mode necessarily causes
problems—it does not. It is only when, doing
mode “volunteers for a job it can’t do” that
problems arise. In many, many, areas of our lives,
doing mode volunteers for a job it can do, and our
lives are the better for it. To make the distinction
clearer, we call problematic applications of this
mode driven–doing, as opposed to the more
general doing.
If action can be taken straightaway to reduce a
discrepancy, and the action is successful, there is
no problem. But what if we cannot find any
effective actions, and our attempts to think up
possible solutions get nowhere? With an external
problem we might simply give up and get on with
some other aspect of our lives. But once the self
becomes involved, it is much more difficult
simply to let go of the goals we have set.
For example, if we are upset because a long-
standing relationship has just ended, there will be
many potential discrepancies between our current
reality and how we wish things to be. We may
wish for restoration of the relationship, or for the
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start of another relationship. Most likely, we also
wish we were not so upset. There may be
solutions we could find. But what if we begin to
feel that we are bound to end up alone, concluding
that there is, in us, some basic failure, a person
that caused the relationship to fail? This
conclusion suggests no ready solution, and the
discrepancy remains. And yet we cannot let go
because we have such a central need not to be this
kind of person—what could be more important to
us than our own sense of identity?
The result of all this is that the mind continues
to process information in doing mode, going
round and round, dwelling on the discrepancy and
rehearsing possible ways to reduce it. And our
continued dwelling on how we are not as we
would like to be just makes us feel worse, taking
us even further from our desired goal. This, in
turn only serves to confirm our view that we are
not the kind of person we feel we need to be in
order to be happy.
The mind will continue to focus in this way
until the discrepancy is reduced or some more
immediately urgent task takes the focus of the
mind elsewhere, only to return to the unresolved
discrepancy once one has dealt with the other task.
When the doing mode is working on internal, self-
related goals like this, we can more accurately call
it the “driven–doing” mode.
If we look closely, we will see the driven–
doing mode in action in very many areas of our
lives. Whenever there is a sense of “have to,”
“must,” “should,” “ought,” or “need to,” we can
suspect the presence of doing mode.
How else might we recognize the driven–doing
mode subjectively? Its most common feature is a
recurring sense of unsatisfactoriness, reflecting
the fact that the mind is focused on processing
mismatches between how we need things to be
and how they actually are. Driven–doing mode
also involves a sense of continuously monitoring
and checking up on progress toward reducing the
gap between these two states (“How well am I
doing?”). Why? Because where no immediate
action can be taken to reduce discrepancies, the
only thing the mind can do is continue to work on
its ideas about how things are and how they
should be, in the hope of finding a way to reduce
the gap between them. This it will do over and
over again.
In this situation, because the “currency” with
which the mind is working consists of thoughts
about current situations, desired situations,
explanations for the discrepancies between them,
and possible ways to reduce those discrepancies,
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these thoughts and concepts will be experienced
mentally as “real” rather than simply as events in
the mind. Equally, the mind will not be fully
tuned in to the full actuality of present experience.
It will be so preoccupied with analyzing the past
or anticipating the future that the present is given
a low priority. In this case, we are only aware of
the present in a very narrow sense: The only
interest in it is to monitor success or failure at
meeting goals. The broader sense of the present,
in what might be called its “full multidimensional
splendor,” is missed.
Driven–doing underlies many of our reactions
to everyday emotional experiences—we
habitually turn to this mode to free ourselves from
many kinds of unwanted emotion. It follows that
we can use such everyday emotional experiences,
and other reflections of the general driven–doing
mode of mind, as training opportunities to learn
skills that enable us to recognize and disengage
from this mode.
Let us consider an alternative mode of mind,
“being.”
THE “BEING” MODE
The full richness of the mode of “being” is not
easily conveyed in words—its flavor is best
appreciated directly, experientially. In many ways,
it is the opposite of the driven–doing mode. The
driven-doing mode is goal-oriented, motivated to
reduce the gap between how things are and how
we think we need them to be; our attention is
narrowly focused on these discrepancies between
actual and desired states. By contrast, the being
mode is not devoted to achieving particular goals.
In this mode, there is no need to emphasize
discrepancy-based processing or constantly to
monitor and evaluate (“How am I doing in
meeting my goals?”). Instead, the focus of the
being mode is “accepting” and “allowing” what is,
without any immediate pressure to change it.
“Allowing” arises naturally when there is no
goal or standard to be reached, and no need to
evaluate experience in order to reduce
discrepancies between actual and desired states.
This also means that attention is no longer focused
narrowly on only those aspects of the present that
are directly related to goal achievement; in being
mode, the experience of the moment can be
processed in its full depth, width, and richness.
Doing and Being differ in their time focus. In
doing, we often need to work out the likely future
consequences of different actions, anticipate what
might happen if we reach our goal, or look back to
memories of times when we have dealt with
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similar situations to get ideas for how to proceed
now. As a result, in doing mode, the mind often
travels forward to the future or back to the past,
and the experience is one of not actually being
“here” in the present much of the time. By
contrast, in being mode, the mind has “nothing to
do, nowhere to go” and can focus fully on
moment-by-moment experience, allowing us to be
fully present and aware of whatever is here, right
now. Doing mode involves thinking about the
present, the future, and the past, relating to each
through a veil of concepts. Being mode, on the
other hand, is characterized by direct, immediate,
intimate experience of the present.
The being mode involves a shift in our relation
to thoughts and feelings. In doing mode,
conceptual thinking is a core vehicle through
which the mind seeks to achieve the goals to
which this mode of mind is dedicated. This means,
as we have seen, that thoughts are seen as a valid
and accurate reflection of reality and are closely
linked to action. In doing mode, the relationship to
feelings is primarily one of evaluating them as
“good things” to hang on to or “bad things” to get
rid of. Making feelings into goal-related objects in
this way effectively crystallizes the view that they
have an independent and enduring reality.
By contrast, in being mode, the relation to
thoughts and feelings is much the same as that to
sounds or other aspects of moment-by-moment
experience. Thoughts and feelings are seen as
simply passing events in the mind that arise,
become objects of awareness, and then pass away.
In the being mode, feelings do not so immediately
trigger old habits of action in the mind or body
directed at hanging on to pleasant feelings or
getting rid of unpleasant feelings. There is a
greater ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotional
states. In the same way, thoughts such as “do this,
do that” do not necessarily automatically link to
related actions, but we can relate to them simply
as events in the mind.
In being mode, there is a sense of freedom and
freshness as experience unfolds in new ways. We
can be responsive to the richness and complexity
of the unique patterns that each moment presents.
In doing mode, by contrast, this wonderful
multidimensional complexity of experience is
boiled down to a narrow, one-dimensional focus:
What does this have to say about my progress in
reaching my goals? Discrepancies between actual
and goal states then trigger fairly well-worn,
general-purpose habits of mind that may have
worked well enough in other situations. But, as we
have seen, when, in the driven–doing mode, the
goal is to be rid of certain emotional states, these
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habits can backfire and lead to perpetuation rather

than cessation of unwanted mind states.
Clearly, doing and being are fundamentally
different modes of mind. Before drawing out the
implications of this difference, it is important that
we be very clear on one point: Being mode is not
a special state in which all activity has to stop.
Doing or being are both modes of mind that can
accompany any activity or lack of activity. Recall
that we gave a particular name to the type of
doing mode that causes problems— “driven–
doing”—and this point may become clearer.
For example, it is possible for one to try to
meditate with so much focus on being someone
who gets into a deeply relaxed state that if
anything interrupts it, one feels angry and
frustrated. That would be meditating in a driven–
doing mode rather than a being mode because the
meditation is “driven” by the need to become a
relaxed person. Or take another example: It is
your turn to do the dishes and there is no way out
of it. No one is going to rescue you from this
chore. If you do the dishes with the aim of
finishing them as quickly as possible to get on to
the next activity and are then interrupted, there
will be frustration, since your goal has been
thwarted. But if you accept that the dishes have to
be done and approach the activity in being mode,
then the activity exists for its own sake in its own
time. An interruption is simply treated as
something that presents a choice about what to do
at that moment rather than as a source of
frustration.

Source:

https://www.mindful.org/difference-between-
being-and-doing/